I am an indie game developer that currently works on a first-person puzzle with elements of stealth. I have no much experience in 3D game development, my experience in this area limits with some small 3D demo scenes I had used to create when I was in a high school. At the time I am on my last course of the particle accelerator physics department in the Moscow Engineering-Physics Institute. So game development is just my big hobby. I am working alone at the time.

Taking into account the facts that I am working alone, not funded and have no great experience in game development, I tried to design a game that would not require tons of content (like textures, models, animations, sounds and so on) and put efforts to design original game mechanics and sophisticated levels. In other words, I tried to design a game that would be feasible for me to implement it alone.

So far I have designed basic game mechanics, the gun and two conceptual levels. I work openly, so you can find the description of the game on my GitHub page https://github.com/duburlan/MW/wiki/Game-concept. I have not stuffed the gameplay with lots of elements yet, because it would be a waste of time if I fail with this concept.

Initially I planned to make a HL2 mod, because there is some content I could use to create a demo and the Source engine fits my needs. The problem is that they do not tell what conditions they have for indie developers who want to sell mods. Licensing a several thousand dollars engine then realizing that people do not buy the game is not wise and affordable for an indie developer. I sent them two emails with questions but no answer so far. Then I learnt about tempting options of UDK commercial use, but I am not sure the Unreal engine is the right choice.

So my question to the community is which SDK do you recommend for implementation of this kind of game? I would appreciate any feedback: do you find this game funny, what would you change, add or remove?

I was inspired by the games of Valve (especially Portal and Portal 2) - Source seemed very polished and it had all the features I need. Additionally, I could make a mod of HL2 using its content to quickly build a demo. Then I had questions about licensing Source that Valve didn't answer. Maybe somebody here used Source for commercial use and could tell me more about it?

Valve are uncharacteristicly reluctant to let indies play with source, it may be a lost cause. There have been some big developments this week with Unreal, Cryengine, and Unity, designed to attract indies, it may be worth looking at their pitches.

After reading forums and articles I come to the conclusion that Source is not the best choice for an indie project: Valve has not done a great job for Source SDK maintenance and the license would be slightly costly. At least they are not going to talk to you until you prove them you have something worth (I think even a great idea is not enough). For those who are interested in this matter there is an informative discussion http://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/8111/why-should-i-consider-using-the-source-engine

UE4 is raw right now and require a beefy hardware, so I would not subscribe to it at least in an half a year. I would rather prefer performance and polishedness to cutting-edginess. I have read about the features and the license terms of UE4, CryEngine and Unity and came to the conclusion that Unity fits me more:

Unity 5 is going to have a backward compatibility with Unity 4

more polished than UE4

modest system requirements

no royalty

What I don't like is that the source code is unavailable and no native plugins in the free edition. Perhaps, I underestimate the power of scripting here =)